Davy's at Woolgate did an excellent job, with all of the staff helpful in setting up the event, allowing me use of the boardroom for the decanting during the afternoon and getting the large number of glasses required cleaned and polished, tables laid out; Claire deserve special mention for looking after us particularly well throughout the evening once the tasting got under way. The food was again superb, confirming this to be an excellent venue for our larger events.

The ports showed very well, all expect for the '48 which was badly corked. WOTN was the '34, followed by '27 and '55. Overall the older Martinez received much acclaim, with 87% of the points awarded to the first page of wines ('22-'58) and no wine >'70 receiving a single point.

Daniel provided a very tasty pork pie with black pudding which made for an excellent pre-starter - my thanks to him for making and providing. Thanks also to Axel for generously donating the wines we had with the main course, and to all who assisted with pre-pouring, and to all who supplied ports from their collection for this tasting.

Excellently organised by Phil — thank you — and as reported with the help from the staff of Woolgate.

Very interesting. Old Martinez is consistently light- to medium-weight, with grape-pip bitterness and grassy/herbal notes. The latter could easily mislead one into thinking Smith Woodhouse. Much good port, multiple vintages rightly getting votes (though I preferred the ’58 to the ’55). But for those vintages of which I have had multiple other shippers, Martinez was not the best of the year.

It was a splendid evening, very well organised and with terrific service from the team at Woolgate. Thank you Phil for all the hard work you put into the planning and delivery.

I am manfully typing up my tasting notes at the moment, but have lost the piece of paper on which I wrote the details of what was decanted when. Could someone please remind me of when the different ports were decanted?

A superb evening and many thanks to Phil for all the efforts to make it all happen. Another successful Woolgate visit, and great to see Tony make it along to his first event.

Overall, based on this tasting I ended up concluding that Martinez seems to have had a life of ups and downs. The older stuff (<= 1955) was very good, the middle ages ('58-'75) were disappointing, and the younger stuff ('82 onwards) was OK but not great. The '87 aside, all the vintages were on the lighter side for colour and weight. All of my points went onto page 1, my WOTN being the '34 with the '27 and '55 sharing second place. The '94 and '97 I thought were quite alright, and worth a revisit in the coming decade to see what is happening with them.